Enron is a critique of market capitalism fit for a college classroom. At school, though, you don’t usually get salacious sex, multimedia electronics or scary little dinosaur puppets, let alone song-and-dance numbers.

Theatre Three opened Lucy Prebble’s play – a big hit inLondonbut a flop on Broadway – Monday in a strong production directed by Jeffrey Schmidt. TheNew Yorkversion so dazzled audiences with its flashing lights and loud score that it was hard to follow the intellectual argument. Schmidt’s version, earthier but no less inventive, gets the ideas across forcefully.

In Prebble’s account of the giantHoustonenergy corporation’s collapse, Jeffrey Skilling (played by Chris Hury) is the vortex of all the excitement in Enron’s rise and subsequent fall. Skilling’s arrogance is based on his certainty that he’s the smartest guy in the room and on his belief that money comes from new ideas. Trouble is, the new ideas tend to be convoluted accounting tricks rather than substantive engineering ones.

Skilling competes with the equally ambitious Claudia Roe (Jennifer Boswell) for the approval of Enron CEO Ken Lay (Doug Jackson). A new numbers guy, Andy Fastow (David Goodwin), worships Skilling and offers him yet another new idea to solve some of the company’s underlying problems. As the stock prices go up and up, the actual profits are going down and down. Fastow invents a shadow corporation to absorb all the losses, but the resulting Ponzi scheme can’t go on forever.

Hury makes Skilling an enormously unlikeable character – with substantially different nuances from the stream of bad guys the actor has been playing over the last couple of years. Yet he also conveys the man’s internal certainty that he really isn’t doing anything wrong. The market system, Skilling contends, just works in this Darwinian way. You’re supposed to make use of any advantage you can muster, whether it seems fair to an outsider or not. Prebbles’ play is really a tragedy – and it’s hard to tell whether Skilling or capitalism itself exhibits the tragic flaw.

Boswell is glamorous and hard-hitting, Jackson slyly avuncular and Goodwin almost innocent in his lurid scheming. The many actors who play everything from security guards to news anchors are uniformly excellent, as well. The play gives them lots of opportunities to try something different. The Enron board members become the three blind mice with giant, bespectacled heads. The Lehman Brothers march around in the same suit, like conjoined twins.

Schmidt’s mostly low-tech evocation of a high-tech world seems dowdy at first, but eventually you catch on to what he is trying to do. Goodwin’s raptor marionettes will give you nightmares. I’m still not convinced that all the musical numbers contribute much to the show, though. They didn’t work in New York, and they don’t work here.

Plan your life

Through May 25 at Theatre Three in the Quadrangle, 2800 Routh St., Dallas. Runs 155 mins. $10 to $50. 214-871-3300. theatre3dallas.com.